RANSVESTIA

Now another diversion because there are so many factors in one's life that you can't just tell it as one consecutive theme. Something else of interest happened which at the time was unrelated to the magazine, FPE and all that. For several years I had been in the habit of attending a one week summer camp at Catalina Island which was sponsored by the YMCA. This particular year I brought along my new wife "D" and got permission to bring my son too. It was a great vacation but that is not the reason for relating it here. There was a young couple who lived in a house at the site and acted as caretakers of the place during the winters and any time there was no camp in session. The only phone in camp was in their house and I had to use it to check up on how things were getting on with the business back in L.A. while I was away. I got to talking with the young wife and I guess she had to have someone to talk to so she began telling me about her domestic problems and I started counselling her. She had been brought up by her father and the husband had been brought up by his mother. As a result they were both a little mixed in their roles since each had a pretty fixed idea of the way the other should act since the other was in the role of the parent of upbringing. That is, she had ideas of the way a man should be because she had gotten them from her father and he had ideas of what a woman should be from his mother. Well, neither of them fitted the other's role model perfectly so there was some friction.

In trying to help them see the whole matter of gender expectations I told her about myself and she was open and understanding. But the significance of the story was that on the last day of camp when we were all leaving she and I were standing on the beach waiting for the small boats which were to take the camp group back to the mainland to arrive and load up. While standing there we got onto the subject of my transvestism and she made an interesting statement which had no significance to me at the time since I hadn't even thought of the magazine at that point. She said, and I am not making this up, "You will be the saviour of your people!" I laughed it off, we talked a few more moments, the boat arrived and I said good bye and got aboard. I have never seen her since.

Back to the story-It would have been around 1958 when I got in touch with a person known as Barbara Elin, who was a TV and who lived in Nashville, Tenn. and who was employed by a radio station there in some executive capacity. We wrote back and forth for a time and then the idea got broached that we might put out a magazine

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